AppFog drops Rackspace support

AppFog, the Platform as a Service that pledged to run your applications on (almost) any cloud, is now one cloud down. As of May 2, the company is “turning off” the Rackspace infrastructure option. An email message announcing the change of plans sent April 27 told customers they could no longer create new applications on Rackspace as of that date.

While helping users host applications on five public clouds was one of Appfog’s main selling points, “it’s also become increasingly resource-intensive to maintain so many instances of our infrastructure,” AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson wrote in the email. He referred users to the AppFog Console, which will enable them to clone their application onto new target infrastructure.

Carlson could not be reached for comment Monday morning, but, Generally speaking, PaaS adoption by business users has been sketchy at best. Many developers love PaaS because it makes development and testing very easy, but once the applications are built, many companies prefer to run them in-house (i.e., not on a public cloud). And, more specifically, there have been rumors that AppFog was seeking investment or even a potential buyout.

I’ve reached out to Carlson for comment and will update this story when he responds.

Update: Carlson would not comment on rationale for dropping Rackspace but did say that AppFog has hundreds of paying customers and that his goal is to “build a big company in a big space.” AppFog still supports Amazon Web Services in three regions — North America, Europe and Asia as well as HP’s cloud.